Re: [sheflug] government open source policy

[Ian Ibbotson <ian.ibbotson [at] xxxxxxxxx>]

Well... My *limited* experience with some of this is that both local and
central gov departments are always very happy to receive proposals that
are based around OSS, but simply saying OSS is good (It is, I'm not
being devils advocate here) isn't going to to address the other things
these departments need to address in proposals ahead of this policy
directive.

Ultimately, OSS is a *Great* differentiator for proposals to local and
central gov't, *once you've ticked all the other boxes*. I actually
believe that these policy documents are a *real* help. The biggest
problem I've run into in seven years of running a company based around
OSS is the "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft" attitude. These
policy documents ultimately mean that if 2 proposals, identical in every
way: money, functionality, supportability, sustainability, etc arrive on
a purchasing managers desk, and they go with the closed source one, the
OSS provider has a real big stick to go after them with. Finding subtle
ways to remind them of that in your proposal is always good :) and
there's so much "Nice" OSS advocacy text out there that it's not usually
hard to find some subtle statement that says "And because it's open
source <insert text about why OSS is better than closed source>".

I don't believe the policy documents are there to force people to adopt
OSS, but they do create a more level playing field. At the end of the
day, there's good software and bad software, in both open and closed
source communities. I know a bit about Moodle (I'm a sakai bod
personally ;)) and it's a good choice for VLE / Course Management in
certain situations, but you have to be prepared to have these policy
documents used against you too. The blackboard / WebCTs / etc (Company
purchases aside) of this world can afford to send people to conferences
where standards such as LIP, RLI, etc, etc are discussed and developed,
or all those worldwide IMS meetings.. they are going to come along and
say "Yeah, it's closed source, but we implement the latest x standard
and we have XML export and we support IMS x/y/z", and our closed source
product checks the open standards box better than any of the current OSS
alternatives. To play the OSS card against that you've gotta have a
pretty strong plan for how you are gonna make the OSS provide for those
standards. Of course, at the end of the day it's all about meeting the
needs of the client, but it's hard to argue that at some point in the
future, those standards won't be critically important to schools and
colleges.

I seem to have gone on a bit... At the end of the day, if we aren't
getting OSS solutions accepted into these situations, we need to take a
good hard look at the people offering solutions and the code itself, and
figure out why these proposals still aren't attractive enough, I'm not
sure there's much our MP's can do about that?

e.


On Tue, 2006-03-14 at 09:30 +0000, David Willington wrote:

> Dear All
> 
> Does anyone know what the relationship is between government policy and
> a public body's duties to it. I'm thinking specifically of the two below
> 
> http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/schemasstandards/egif_document.asp?docnum=949
> 
> http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/policydocs/policydocs_document.asp?docnum=905&topic=61&topictitle=Open+Source+Software+Policy+&subjecttitle=Open+Source+Software
> 
> If I've understood them correctly it's government policy for publicly
> funded bodies to use open standards in document exchange and to consider
> open source solutions when getting IT resources but this doesn't happen.
> I'm helping a school setup moodle and a website CMS. They like the open
> source options but in the next few months the preferred provider for the
> Building Schools for the Future scheme's going to be announced and there
> doesn't seem to be any mention of open source at all. My MP hasn't
> replied yet.
> 
> Thanks
> 
> David Willington
> 
> 
> ___________________________________________________________________
> 
> Sheffield Linux User's Group -
> http://www.sheflug.co.uk/mailfaq.html
> 
>   GNU the choice of a complete generation.


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